None of your hypotheticals seem to have anything to do with your original question, which was do more people emigrate to the US legally than the 100,00 illegally caught crossing the border in February.
Yeah....that actually does have to do with the original question since it relates to the number of people following the legal process vs those breaking it at some point.
However, I'm willing to concede that both the lack of clarity regarding my post and the lack of available data makes it difficult to ascertain the facts.
To which the answer appears to most definitely be a yes. Somewhere north of 1.8 million people legally become emigrees just via permanent residency and naturalisations. This doesn't count other intakes, such as refugees, asylum seekers and special visa recipients.
It's also not counting the number of people who gained legal status despite entering the US illegally.
If you want a simple calculus of that....
You can take the popular number of illegals the left likes to estimate are in the US every year.
That's about 11 million.
Take the number of people apprehended on any given year and subtract the number removed.
We're going to end up with a number in the hundreds of thousands....
Border Crisis: CBP’s Response
So about 1 million in 2018 entered with the people apprehending them characterizing them as intending to stay.
In 2018....about a little more than 250k illegal immigrants were deported.
That leaves about 750k.
Since the estimate of 11 million illegals never really changes....or at least it hasn't every year for around the last decade.....
We can reasonably assume that a significant number of those illegally present gain legal status every year. Sure, some die, some leave of their own will.
I haven't seen any evidence that it's a number big enough to offset the illegals caught vs illegals removed on any given year.
In fact, the reasons for why the number doesn't really change is a mix of deportations, deaths, and gaining legal status.
Let's assume though....that everyone counted in the numbers you quoted came in legally or otherwise were not here illegally at any time (like overstaying a visa).....
That makes the million entering illegally about 1 third of the population we're talking about.
If we go with the high end estimate of my number that's more likely somewhere between 40-60%.
The 10 year average is notably lower, at about 1.2 million emigrees per year. Based on that, the flows are level pegged- but that ignores the ~300-400,000 deportations and the hundreds of thousands of 'returns' (people detained at/near the border and put back across it) per year.
And how many entries are detected but don't get apprehended (aka got away)?
